He’s not well-known in the US, but in Britain Peter Kay is a bona fide comedy star. His 2010 stand-up comedy tour holds the Guinness World Record as the most successful comedy tour of all time, with 1.2 million tickets sold, and he’s been the star of a staggering amount of television shows and specials, although since this is Britain we’re talking about, his total amount of air time is still dwarfed by something like Everybody Loves Raymond.Max and Paddy’s Road to Nowhere is a spinoff of Phoenix Nights, a sitcom about a working men’s club in Northern England. In the final episode of Phoenix, the club’s doormen go on the run in an RV after a wacky misadventure. If there’s one thing TV loves, it’s a wacky misadventure, so they continue apace in Nowhere.

Strengths

Peter Kay as Max. The show isn’t riotously funny, but I can understand why Peter Kay’s career has been such a success. Almost all of the laughs come from his portrayal of Max, a bumbling and oafish but well-intentioned lowlife. It’s the little things that do it—the affection when he calls Paddy a “melon,” the indignant squawks of “How dare you!?,” and the gormless look on his face when everything goes wrong. This episode contains an inexplicably serious storyline, and Kay does credibly well with the dramatic fare. At one point Max straight-up launches into song, and Kay’s singing voice isn’t bad! For Kay, it’s quite a tour de force for a 22 minute sitcom.

Restrained and reasonably sensitive portrayal of dwarfism. This episode deals with Max running into his ex-girlfriend Tina (Lisa Hammond,) and she’s a little person. For a show with a distinctly vulgar sensibility, this isn’t played for laughs. No one feels the need to remark upon it and there are arguably no jokes at her expense. I say arguably because at one point Tina tells Max that she’s secretly given birth to his child. Max blurts out, “How tall is he?” He quickly corrects himself. I think this is really more of a joke about Max being a dumbass, but I also don’t have dwarfism or, indeed, any physical disability, so feel free to contact me and tell me if you feel differently about this exchange or Tina’s portrayal in general. Either way, it’s a damn sight better than Life’s Too Short.

Weaknesses

Crass. It tells you something about a show’s sense of humor when the very first thing that happens in a given episode is someone farting. Shortly thereafter, Max accidentally soaks a traffic cop with a bucket of urine. Later, a party-goer sings an angry song about being pressured into a vasectomy. It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I don’t love this kind of humor. I prefer it when comedy reflects psychological, social and cultural foibles, or when it’s just flat-out absurdist surrealism. Everyone farts. Regardless of what Louis CK says, it’s not intrinsically funny. The piss joke is a little better because the director employs the classic comedy technique of conveying the awful situation (the piss-soaked bobby) and cutting away before we see the fallout.

Gay panic. I watched two episodes of this show and they both feature jokes about the protagonists cringing as people confuse them for lovers. Wikipedia tells me that this is also a central plot point in a third episode. Look, this wasn’t funny when it happened 9 million times on Friends and it’s not funny now. Maybe you could make a mealy-mouthed argument similar to the one I just made about Tina and say this is really a joke about their insecurity in their masculinity, but I’d just rather not have to spend the time making excuses.

Attempt at serious dramatic storytelling. The two episodes I watched were a study in contrasts. One was a shaggy dog story about trying to steal a plasma TV, and the other was about Max coming to terms with the fact that his ex has moved on—despite the fact that she secretly had his baby. It’s not a felicitous marriage of sitcom and soap opera. It doesn’t help when the show doubles down on this with a maudlin scene featuring Max singing the entirety of “I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues” while giving Tina pointed looks. I mean, she could have left the room after the first verse. That would have given us more time for actual jokes. There is eventually a high comic resolution to this story when Max and Paddy abduct a school bus full of children in an effort to get closer to Max’s newfound son. Of course, the kid isn’t even on that particular bus. I’m not sure that’s worth trying to get the viewer invested in Max’s love life, though.

Final Judgment: 5/10. It turns out there’s a reason Nowhere fever hasn’t spread around the globe.

NEXT TIME: On the one hand: Pirates! On the other hand: A Starz original series…I review Black Sails.

Comic book superheroes have been filling airtime on your television since the 1960s, but the 21st century bore witness to an endless flurry of entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the concordant money blizzard meant that TV shows weren’t far behind. In Hollywood, there’s one thing that’s better than beating a dead horse, and that’s beating someone else’s dead horse, so Warner belatedly caught on and introduced us to their own “extended universe.” DC has been less vigilant about brand synergy, so Gotham kinda-sorta stands on its own, disregarding the fact that it’s soaked and dripping with Batman intellectual property jizz. Between 2012 and today, a whopping total of 10 MCU/DCEU properties have darkened our screens, and that’s not including shows based on comics from DC’s Vertigo imprint, like iZombie, Preacher, and Lucifer. Really, the impressive thing is that I went through 66 other shows before arriving at the groaning board of comic book grimdark that made action movies (temporarily) obsolete.

Strengths

Impressive special effects. It’s nice to live in an era where the special effects necessary for a vaguely supernatural action-adventure crime procedural don’t reduce the viewer to Manimal-grade fits of hysterics. The nice people behind Gotham are quickly digging through their supply of famous Batman villains, which I’m sure will lead to an excellent confrontation with Calendar Man in season 7. Tonight’s offering, along with its immediate predecessor, tells us the sad tale of the rise and fall of Mr. Freeze, aka Victor Fries (Nathan Darrow, House of Cards.) And where would Mr. Freeze be without blasts of icy death? Gotham’s finest stumble upon a victim who was shooting his gun mid-freeze, and the bullet is captured mid-air like an icicle emerging from the gun. At one point Fries throws an ice grenade into the For-All-Intents-And-Purposes East River, and the instantaneous appearance of giant icy spikes is very satisfying. The show doesn’t waste all its industrial light & magic on Freeze, either—Oswald “Penguin” Cobblepot (Robin Lord Taylor) is briefly subjected to questionable mad-science based therapy and some fun color filters and deft camera-work does a lot of heavy lifting on behalf of the audience’s atrophied imagination.

Strong ensemble cast. Taylor’s Penguin is the real discovery here, and his range is fantastic—mincing, brooding, menacing, sycophantic and downright maniacal—but the cast is almost exclusively (see below) excellent. I can never get enough Donal Logue (Ghost Rider) and he inhabits the role of the Bad Cop nicely. B.D. Wong (Jurassic World) is delightful as the cartoonishly fiendish Hugo Strange. Erin Richards does well as Barbara Kean in what could have been a very dull role, although in this episode she’s in a coma, so it’s not going to show up on the sizzle reel. You may also have heard about how Jada Pinkett Smith made an enormous splash as Fish Mooney in season one, so, yeah, the casting directors know what they’re doing. For the most part.

Atmospheric. At least 50% of any given Batman narrative is nailing the feel of Gotham City and environs. It’s a caricature of the most forbidding parts of New York in particular and the urban experience in general. It’s outrageous wealth and intimidating architecture. You get the sense that the show understands this even in its stock transition shots, which swoop across the forbidding skyline. Arkham Asylum is an experience unto itself, a total institution straight out of the nineteenth century and packed to the gills with colorful sociopaths. Once again, Gotham gets it right—the sets, the lighting, the classic jailbird outfits. The bat cave is also everything you’d want in a bat cave—stalactites, mysterious water source, late Victorian lighting fixtures and all the trimmings of a research laboratory perfect for a weirdo who hangs out in a cave under his mansion.

Making the best out of a tired Mr. Freeze story. The way the show handles Freeze is something of a disappointment. Every other villain you’d care to name gets a unique origin story—Penguin, The Riddler (Cory Michael Smith), Catwoman (Camren Bicondova), Poison Ivy (Clare Foley, Sinister). What does Mr. Freeze get? Dying wife, same as in town. Why reinvent the canon everywhere but here? Tip: If for some reason you’re trying to bring Mr. Freeze back into the public consciousness of people who don’t read comic books, the last thing you want is to remind anyone of Batman & Robin. At least they managed to resist ice-related puns. This episode has a fun twist, though—Victor’s long-suffering wife Nora (Kristen Hager, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem) decides she’s had enough of her husband’s crime spree and her own terminal illness and kills herself with Victor’s own defective cryogenic solution. I’m choosing to interpret this as a political victory for the death with dignity movement.

Weaknesses

Bruce Wayne. Here’s another tip. Thinking about using child actors? Think again, motherfucker. It’s not really actor David Mazouz’s fault—the least interesting thing about any Batman story is Batman himself, and I assume Bruce’s flat affect and critical lack of a personality is as written. The thing is, this story is about the world of Batman before Batman is a major player on the scene. I would be thrilled if Bruce was featured only occasionally and when absolutely necessary. He is not necessary here.

Gordon. And while we’re at it, there’s a major exception to the praise I’ve doled out for the casting on this show. Ben McKenzie’s Gordon has the charisma of a deck of beige paint samples, which would be okay if he were a minor character. Instead, he’s the main event. This isn’t the first network drama to have a painfully bland white man holding down the top billing—I see you, Lost—and God knows it won’t be the last. It does take the wind out of the sails for many of the storylines, though. I know I’m supposed to care about Gordon’s slow descent into the dark side. I understand how Gordon and his lover, Leslie (Morena Baccarin, Deadpool) are meant to form a thematic pair with the Frieses. I remain unmoved.

Contrivance. The big set piece in this episode entails Freeze taking Arkham by storm to rescue Nora. Why is Nora there? Oh, because the cops decided that they couldn’t secure a room in a regular hospital or at the police station, so clearly the best thing to do was to take her to a prison for the criminally insane. This yields dividends—seeds are planted for the ongoing relationship between Strange and Freeze, Gordon is forced to come face to face with Penguin after letting Penguin take the fall for a murder they were both involved in—but it feels pretty cheap since the whole reason all the characters came to Arkham in the first place was complete fucking nonsense.

Final Judgment: 6/10. The media landscape is saturated with superheroes right now, and DC is as usual behind the eight ball, but based on what I’ve seen of the rest of their TV shows, Gotham might be the best of a bad lot. Team Marvel for the win.

NEXT TIME: Hey, it’s been a little over a year since I reviewed The Wrong Mans, so in honor of that I’ll review another British buddy comedy: Max and Paddy’s Road to Nowhere.